Editorial, issue 14.1

Dear readers,

With this issue of Human IT we proudly present a highly interesting and varied edition. Before introducing the articles, we wish to inform our readership that during we 2018 have been working on the task to renew our editorial board. We very much appreciate the positive responses and hereby want to wish our new board members welcome to join our work. We are very happy and proud to here announce the new Human IT editorial board:

Mats Fridlund, Aalto-yliopisto
Koraljka Golub, Linnéuniversitetet
Guðrún Rósa Þórsteinsdóttir, Háskólinn á Akureyri
Terje Hillesund, Universitetet i Stavanger
Anna-Malin Karlsson, Stockholms universitet
Jonas Linderoth, Högskolan i Skövde
Cecilia Lindhé, Göteborgs universitet
Marianne Lykke, Aalborg universitet
Camilla Moring, Københavns universitet
Pelle Snickars, Umeå universitet

At the same time, we wish to thank our previous board for all their important work to maintain the high standards of the journal during the last 20 years, with your help to ensure the quality of the journal. Thank you all!

This issue contains three peer-review articles and one open section piece. In the article, “Did Gaius Julius Caesar Write De Bello Hispaniensi? A Computational Study of Latin Classics”, Livia R. Zhang, Trevor Cohen and Scott McGill have studied how methods of distributional semantics, such as Random Indexing models, can detect authorships. In this case, the ancient latin authorship of Gaius Julius Ceasar’s has been scrutinized and results suggest reinterpretation of texts attributed to him.

If the first peer review article deals with ancient documents, the next article considers a more recent issue of web behavior and trust. “Intentions to Use the TripAdvisor Review Website and Purchase Behavior After Reading Reviews”, by Joshua Fogel and Kathleen Murphy, discusses the intentions to use services based on reviews, such as TripAdvisor. The authors stress the risk of building trust based on fraudulent reviews and the importance of service providers’ response to both positive and negative reviews, to assure their trustworthiness.

In the same alley, the third peer review article, called “Den 80-årige bloggkungen: En studie av språkliga konstruktioner av äldre i förhållande till IT”, written by Karolina Wirdenäs and Theres Bellander, discusses a specific phenomenon related to web behavior – namely attitudes associated to these behaviors in the contemporary Swedish society. The authors discuss the place and role of senior citizens by exploring taken for granted values about different age groups’ use of ICTs.

The People & Opinions section piece, ”Intensivt hat och gedigen kärlek: Den intrikata Internetbombningen” by Marissa Ernlund, discusses contradictory ways to use social media – the positive alternative of communicating love, i.e., ‘love bombing’ and the destructive alternative of ‘bombing’ – with their contradictory results. In the article, Ernlund discusses the consequences of these two varieties of ‘bombings’ – bombing with love or with hate. She concludes that they are tremendously different, both online and offline, and have completely different effects. In the article, it is stated that ‘love bombing’ can be a result of a need for a more tolerating society. This is something that we need to contemplate during the last weeks of 2018, a very eventful year, not the least regarding the tendencies of hardening attitudes and an increasing demand for order and control in western societies.

With these words, we wish you all the best and joyful reading,
Maria Lindh, December 2018